Bright April

I used to like Sara Teasedale's "I Shall Not Care", and I think the sliver of me that is an angst-ridden teenager still has a soft spot for it. But while looking for it online, I ran across this one, which seems more appropriate, in a broader sense, now:


There Will Come Soft Rains

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.


Sara Teasedale



Now, isn't that cheerful?


But I mean, honestly, that you can either look at the way in which the world has gone on fine before us and will do so after us - before and after each of us, individually, myself included, and before and after all of us, collectively - and you can find this to be about the most depressing, ego-deflating, terrifyingly brutal thing, or you see at is as a comfort. It means that the mountains in North Wales that I feel a part of will be just fine without me. Dinas Bran will continue to crumble into ruins, and the gorse will bloom every year. Fortunately, I am not responsible for the sun rising in the east and setting in the west. That's some relief.

I've mentioned my love of ants. I've written a new poem about them. And after I test it out on an online poetry community I belong to, I'll post it here. Because it's April, and I am working on poems before the coming of the soft rains.